Your “Warrior” Energy Can Move Mountains!
Your personality is made up of several parts that have different functions: leadership, action, thinking and feeling, for example. By working with these parts of your personality one at a time, the effectiveness and power of life coaching can be greatly enhanced.
None of these parts is more or less important than the others – they all need to work effectively, with balanced energy, for you to achieve success in the world.
Here, I’d like to explain a little more about the part of your personality which is concerned with taking action in the world, with getting things done. It’s also the part of you which defends your boundaries from assault, and protects you from the actions of others.
You could call this part of personality the “Action Taker” or the “Guardian of Action”. In archetypal terms it is the part known as the Warrior.
Maybe you’re wondering why we call these parts of the personality “archetypes”? Simple – because they are a fundamental part of every man and woman’s personality. That’s all the word archetype means – a part of the personality which is clearly identifiable in everyone. The important point is that a shadow work practitioner can work with your various archetypes in all kinds of ways during your coaching sessions.
Warriors Have Energy!
The Warrior within you is concerned with going out into the world and getting things done. He or she is concerned with building things, with taking action, with making things happen. And he or she is also concerned with defending the boundaries of your Kingdom or Queendom, be that your business, your family, your home, or your world. Here’s a video which explains more about the Warrior archetype and what this energetic part of your personality does for you in your life.
A Video To Explain The Male Archetypes
The Warrior In Your World
Warriors get a bit of a bad press in our society – and no wonder. The inhumanity of warfare in the 20th and 21st century has exceeded anything even the darkest mind could imagine. And regrettably most of this warrior energy is associated with masculinity and men. (I don’t look around the world and see many women causing aggressive warfare.)
So no wonder that warrior energy has a bad rap, no wonder that women are scared of it, or at least uncomfortable with it. Even aggressive energy is tainted with the same sense of disapproval or danger. The problem is that this kind of energy – whether you call it aggression or anger or simply label it as “energy” – is an inherent part of each one of us. You can’t just wish it away. You can, of course, bring it into consciousness and thereby bring it under your control. This is what matters – taking action! If you feel your own warrior is out of control, then see a coach or therapist who can help you bring him into line. The ideal kind of support here is from a shadow work practitioner, for men and women in this area of therapy are trained in the art of bringing the energy of the warrior out of the shadow and into consciousness, where it will be under your control.
So if these “angry” impulses are suppressed, repressed, driven underground into the unconscious, they will build up until they explode in an even more unhelpful way. Moore and Gillette wrote in their book King Warrior Magician Lover about Jane Goodall’s research into chimpanzee society. Goodall lived in close proximity to chimpanzees for years in Africa. She first reported that these apes were all harmonious and loving creatures. Now, keep in mind that chimpanzees share 98% of their genes with us – or is it the other way round? Either way, this is our closest genetic relation in the primate family.
And guess what? Jane Goodall came to realise that these chimpanzees were not in any way peaceful. In fact they waged war on other chimpanzee tribes, they killed young babies, and abuse, “theft”, murder and aggression were commonplace.
This led Robert Ardrey to claim that human beings are governed by the same instincts in his book The Territorial Imperative. However, this is far too simplistic. The difference between us and chimpanzees, I think it’s fair to say, is that we have a highly evolved neo-cortex and that gives us a conscious awareness which allows us to choose how we behave in any situation. To be more exact, we can choose what we do with our archetypal energies. The Warrior is no exception. We can choose to use our Warrior archetypal energy in an aggressive way or a constructive way.
What Might You Choose?
Our Warrior is the part of us responsible for going out into the world and getting things done. Preferably, getting things done under the orders of the King or Queen. After all, that is – or should be – the guiding force in our Kingdoms and Queendoms.
And while a Warrior may of course serve a tyrant king, an unjust cause, or engage in cruelty and wrongdoing against humanity, that doesn’t make Warrior energy in itself inherently wrong. Rather, it is the way Warrior energy is used which seems to be way off beam, much of the time.
As a result, you can see how little liking, how much distaste, there is for “warrior-like” energy in our world, in so many ways. And one of the most obvious of these is how repressed it is in our individual lives.
Of course, anything which is repressed finds its way out – often in indirect but still damaging ways. Violent computer games and violent films have become mainstream in society, the latter shown without impunity on the TV or in movies. And some of the acts depicted in computer games and films go far beyond the standards of decency and compassion that most people would consider appropriate to bring into their everyday lives.
Video – the archetypal Warrior
So what is real Warrior Energy?
To put it simply, the Warrior is the agent of change in the world, and will act in service to those in power. This is a completely different framework of looking at Warrior energy. It’s about constructive achievement, about going out into the world and getting things done, and changing things for the better.
Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette give many examples of how Warrior energy has been used to spread traditions of great value, enhance civilisation and develop human culture. Generally this has been done by Warriors who embody courage and devotion to a cause greater than themselves.
Thus Warrior energy is a great element of world building – both individually and collectively. Our tragedy is that this energy has been so corrupted and misused by those who seek to gain advantage from it.
The Warrior in His Fullness
The Warrior in his fullness – his most mature form – has a very different image to that of the enforced Warrior, battling in an army into which he’s been conscripted, fighting for a cause of which he may know nothing, and care less. Sure, he may display aggressive qualities, but you have to understand that this word has a different meaning in this context.
There’s aggression for aggression’s sake, but there’s also an energy within us which causes us to take the offensive and to move out of a defensive, depressed, submissive position in response to life’s challenges and problems.
(For women, Warrior energy can manifest rather more in the defence of what is, rather than the desire to change what is, although it’s certainly true that women can show Warrior energy just as much as men in business, for example, when they choose to do so.)
The question is, of course, how our Warriors know what’s appropriate in any set of circumstances. The answer is not a simple one. But at its simplest, Warriors inherently know what is needed because they are highly trained.
Many authors have written about the Warrior class, and while I don’t want to reinvent cliches, there is some truth in the idea of training individual men and women as fighters. The classic example is the Samurai. Warriors of this kind were certainly not mindless Samurai clones who went into battle at the wish of their Emperor, though.
They made their own choices and decisions, and they would only serve a cause or a leader for as long as they felt the cause was right, and the leader was just. And this brings us on to an important Warrior quality: discernment.
Warriors are discerning about how they employ their energy. They may use a full-on assault, or a more cunning strategic approach. Both of these approaches may require all the energy the Warrior can muster, but the strategic approach is more subtle and indirect. In other words, the warrior is clever and wise – and can be subtle, when his battles require subtlety.
There is also a difference between the mature Warrior energy of a man in mid-life and the immature Warrior energy of a young man. Perhaps young men have a duty to be heroic. After all, they have a job to do – they have to go out into the world and discover who they are, discover what their place in the world may be, discover that in fact they cannot defeat the world. This is the young man’s Hero’s journey.
Heroes are romantic, and so they often think they can change the world for the better all by themselves. It may require some harsh lessons in how the world works – which seem inevitable in the face of the young man’s arrogance – before a hero can mature into a truly masculine mature Warrior.